The title of this book and the back cover convinced me to buy this book on sight. "At last," I thought, "a book covering the dificult task of game engine architechture." I was very wrong. This book does a fair job of going one level deeper than the Game Programming Gurus series, or 3D Game programming by De Geos, or any of the hack retained mode Direct X books, but it does not come close to the full knowledge of Foley - Van Dam, or the Watt and Watt books. It is written at a math level that if you can easily understand it, you don't need it. This book, ignoring its title for a minute is a poor substitute for Real Time Rendering even at twice the thickness. It is more complicated than the two excellent books by the Watt brothers, 3D Computer Graphics and Advanced Animation and Rendering Techniques. It fails to explain architecture even remotely as well as Lakos' book Large Scale C++. In short it does a poor job at replicating what many books have done before.What it does do though, is expose a glaring hole in all the books relating to graphics programming and games in particular. There still is no good book on designing a game engine. I work in the industry, and while I've seen some briliant ideas on visual effects and performance gains, I have never seen an architecture that wouldn't have the lead programmer fired from any other industry. There is a need for what the title indicates, but the subject is contained in appendix A. The rest of the book is about culling and collisions and ray tracing and every other low level library function I could have gotten from a dozen books. There is massive amounts of source code. And while reasonably well written as a library, the whole is woefully lacking as a framework. This book should have been the other way around. We all have the libraries, how about a little discussion on the framework to hang them in.

This book, for just being released, was very well put together. It was divided into the various sections of the 70-320 test, giving you enough information about the current topic. It didn't go more in-depth as if I had hoped it would, but it does prepare you for the exam. I only found a few grammatical & code errors, but overall, it was a well edited book.

I passed the test with 51 right out of 60. This book definitely helped clear up some concepts I had been hazy on in the past, like the relationships between segments and extents. I might even keep it around as a reference just because it's got enough condensed info on a wide range of topics that it might prove useful at some point when I need to create a profile or a partitioned index.If you have the extra dough, spring for the practice tests at selftestsoftware.com. Some of those questions showed up almost word for word on the exam.

This books covers everything you need for passing Sun Certified Java Programmers Exam.The Explanations are so clear that even a person with no previous programming experience can easily understand the complications of the Java language .Very difficult topics like inner classes, Threads, I/O are explained in a very understandable and intresting way.That book will, for sure increase your interest in the language.